Thank you to today’s guest blogger, Jackie Luft, Online Accessibility Specialist for Texas Tech Worldwide eLearning. As we start the new academic year, the issue of assuring that our courses are accessible arises anew. Jackie gives us great resources and advice on how to better serve our students.

The beginning of the semester brings updates to all of our online courses. Dates are entered, a few new assignments are added, and few are revised and we throw a few assignments in the trash. Maybe there is a textbook with a new edition. Maybe now is a good time to add some Universal Design elements, and consider reviewing your course for online accessibility?

Accessibility – Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law!

As you know, providing online accessibility is a federal law. Several lawsuits in the past years have made an impact on the progression towards accessibility in online environments in higher education. The following laws are the basis of the lawsuits, and are used as guidance for online accessibility.

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 states that no qualified student with a disability shall on the basis of disability, “be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or otherwise be subjected to discrimination under any…postsecondary program or activity….”.

Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 includes specific requirements for communication, “A public entity shall take appropriate steps to ensure that communications with applicants, participants, members of the public, and companions with disabilities are as effective as communication with others.”

Lawsuits say that, “Accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantial ease of use” (South Carolina Technical College). Most lawsuits emphasis the statements “fully and equally accessible” and “ease of use.” University of Montana – Missoula adds that “individuals with disabilities are able to independently acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services within the same time-frame.”

Can I Just Wait Until I Have a Student with an Accessibility Need?

But what if I don’t have a student with a disability in my class, I never have.” This may be true, but your instructional material needs to be ADA compliant whether you have a student with a disability enrolled or not.

Have you considered the population of students that do not declare their disability? Did you know that implementing ADA standards to your online instructional material helps all students to learn more easily?

How Can I Address Online Accessibility in My Courses?

Online accessibility and Universal Design of Learning can be overwhelming. Below is a checklist that includes both online accessibility and Universal Design of Learning elements. The list is broken into areas that are typical of an online course. Instructors can use this list as a quick review to decide what to work on throughout the year.

Adding a few of these elements every semester will leave you with a well-designed, inclusive course that will be more accessible to all your students, not just those with disabilities. Note that the items on the list with bold and an asterisk are the federal ADA standards for online content, and the rest are suggestions for Universal Design of learning.

Keep in mind these resources for your online instructional material as you are prepping for your next year of instruction. Not only will your class meet federal guidelines, but you will be making your course accessible to all students, including for those with undeclared disabilities.

Although the list may seem daunting, selecting one area at a time and focusing on that will lead to constant progress towards providing accessible instructional material.

This is a very good checklist – thanks! One question – should sans serif font really be marked as an ADA standard? I have never heard that before and can’t find anywhere to support that. I realize that generally sans serif is considered preferable for on-screen viewing, but to say that it is an absolute requirement seems incorrect.http://webaim.org/techniques/fonts/

If you are certain that this is an absolute, could you provide a reference?

Great article. I plan on sharing it with our professors. However, I take exception to stating that captions on videos must be “closed”. In most cases, Open captions are preferred. They are better for the students and not all viewers support closed captions. I believe it is better state that all videos should be captioned, not “closed captioned”. That leaves room for the best approach in given situations.

Cynthia: Jackie quotes on non-compliance finding which is basically the OCR interpretation of accessibility: “Accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantial ease of use” This has been the official interpretation since before 2007 when the enforcement actions began. OCR cites that definition in Dear Colleague letters back to the early 2000s.

This interpretation is based on a few things including ADA, but as Jackie points out only about 30% of students with disabilities in higher ed choose to self-disclose. And, what disability services identifies as a disability sometimes doesn’t include all disabilities (e.g. color blindness).

Short answer is that all digital materials need to be accessible. So the institutional website, online courses, and digital materials that may be part of blended courses should all be accessible.

So, start now making everything from this point forward accessible. (or at least as accessible as possible). Your institution should (hopefully) provide support because things like captioning can take resources. If you can find the recording of webinar Jackie recently did on captioning, there’s a lot of information there.

What I like to tell folks when they start is to take care of the “low hanging fruit” first. Color and ALT tags. Both are two of the most commonly identified problems in all the compliance reviews and suits that I have studied. Fix those and the accessibility checkers have less to identify.

I agree, all the standards can be overwhelming. I encourage instructors to pick one area and make that great! The problem is when instructors do not comply and then there is a letter of accommodation. At Texas Tech University, we have an Online Accessibility Lab (http://www.ttu.edu/accessibility/online-accessibility-lab.php) that assists with this process.